Netflix has a lot fewer top-rated movies than it did 2 years ago

Netflix's US streaming catalog has
shrunk by over 50% since 2012, but Netflix has always argued
that the quality of the material keeps getting better.

In 2013, Netflix began producing original shows and movies, which
were more expensive but gave subscribers something they couldn't
get anywhere else.

"You can imagine that we could have a million low-quality
videos that almost no one wants to watch and then say, hey, we
have the largest catalog in the world," Netflix's Carlos
Gomez-Uribe
told Business Insider in a recent interview. "What matters is
how many videos are people actually watching."

However, there's some evidence that Netflix is actually
losing quality titles as it invests more in originals.

Here's one example: Netflix's selection of the top movies
ever made, at least by IMDB ratings, has gone down in the last
two years by a substantial amount.

In August 2014, a
Reddit user tracked how many of IMDB's top 250 movies list
were available to stream on Netflix. At the time, 49 were
available, which is around 20% of the
total. Streaming
Observer, a blog that tracks the streaming industry, decided
to revisit the list and see if it had changed. They found that in
September, only 31 of those movies were available, or
about 12% of the total.

Netflix has repeatedly says that its focus moving forward
is on "exclusive" titles: either "originals" it makes itself, or
shows and movies not available on other streaming services.
Getting great movies is part of the goal, but it's also
important that those classics aren't available on Amazon, Hulu,
and so on. The goal is to get you hooked enough
on Netflix to keep you paying that $9.99 per month.